Slightly Biased Manga

Things are a little more on track than they were in the last volume.  We get weird supernatural beings, a sad, emotional story, and even some plot, which is sorely needed at this point.  But I went back to adoring this series again.

Though it’s got no direct bearing on the story, Marley mentions in the front she stopped drawing the series for awhile and started back up with this volume.  It’s noticeable, actually.  I thought it would be worth mentioning.

I almost didn’t recognize Sunbi.  The character design changed, she cut her hair short.   The first story is about her getting trapped inside a prison by a three-headed boy with one leg and a beak mouth.  There’s a mysterious boy who lives at her old house (I think), and he sends the Dokebi after her to rescue her.  It was an okay story, and like I said, it got back to the meat of things in this series, which was important.

The best story was the longest, which was about Sunbi and the Dokebi stumbling across a town where a young woman struggled every day against what people thought of her family since her mother was a mute hunchback.  The point was most brought home with her boyfriend, who was the worst of the lot.  It was a real tearjerker, much like the first volume of the series.  I also really like stories like this too, and this series does them extraordinarily well.  The only bad thing is that, while discussing the relationship between the woman and her mother, there were some interjections about Sunbi’s mother that I had trouble recognizing as flashbacks… because they sort of are randomly interjected.  I also can’t follow them too well.  Maybe they’ll make sense further down the line.  The story only marginally involves Sunbi and the Dokebi, but Sunbi’s got more of a role than she had in the last volume, and this story was loads better than that one as well.

The third story does try to start some plot back up.  We go back to Sunbi’s hometown, and there are some brief moments with her step-sister, the glasses-wearing friend, and the strange boy from the first chapter.  The boy talks a bit about a connection between he and Sunbi, and the last page sets things up for the next volume.

I think this series has caught up with the Korean serialization, so I think new volumes are going to be a rare thing, but it’s just so good, and I’m glad we got to see a bit of a return to what makes it good.